


Thank God, it's Christmas

by flash in the pan (MadameLaMielleuse)



Category: David Bowie (Musician)
Genre: Blizzards & Snowstorms, Christmas Eve, Christmas Fluff, F/M, Romance, Snow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-11
Updated: 2016-04-11
Packaged: 2018-06-01 18:03:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6530353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MadameLaMielleuse/pseuds/flash%20in%20the%20pan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cinna is a young student in her twenties trying to get home for the holidays, when a snowstorm forces her to stay in NYC. The evening takes a turn when she runs into David Bowie - the exact delightfully lame rockstar-become-painter who spent exorbitant amounts of acrylic paint on capturing her for the first half of the year and then just stopped cold turkey and disappeared when they had been at risk of getting into a relationship.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This two-piece is one chapter of my main story. However, it can be read as a stand-alone.  
> The main story evolves around a relationship between two people, Cinna and David. The story sets in in 2003, at the start of A Reality Tour. As it evolves, it becomes clear that there is a reason why Cinna accompanies her partner on tour: there's trouble in paradise as David has told her out of the blue that he wants a child. As Cinna tries to get close to him, she has to confront their past. The 2003 storyline chapters are intersected by a 1993 storyline in which it is described how they met and how it affected both of their lives and relationships with their families.  
> This chapter is relatively near the end of the 1993 storyline. It was the first final draft I did of the scene, but it has since changed a lot. However, the rest of my story is in German, it's fairly long (100,000+ words) and I haven't come around yet to translate it into English.

“Time Inc, how can I assist you?“ the fresh voice of the receptionist announced.

“Yes, hello, I’d like to talk Roxanne Liljeqvist, please?“ Cinna asked. While listening, she peeked nervously over her shoulder. An obese man in trench coat and a bushy mustache had already snapped impatiently at her as she had unearthed her calling card.

“Miss?“ The friendly voice answered again, professionally quiet for the hour where last drafts were being requested just in time for the winter holidays. “I just heard that she left, you have missed her for ten minutes. The trainees went for coffee.”

With a heavy sigh, Cinna felt her hope fading away. She looked around: LaGuardia, the time machine back to the Fifties, the catastrophic architectural work of a New York airport, was not her preferred place to spend more time in than to board her – now cancelled – plane.

It all had started with the weather forecast announcing a snow front by which extent they were completely overwhelmed when it arrived. When Cinna had left her small college room around noon with her suitcase in hand, she had not expected to have to deal with Véronique again before the start of spring semester. She scoffed at the thought of the girl, who lived in the room next to her and never cleaned up properly after using the kitchen.

She tried to remember what Mickey had told her and his twin sister Roxy during Saturday brunch about where their oldest sibling was – Quebec? In any case, Julia had planned to fly from there down to JFK and then take the same flight as Cinna and Mickey to Akron. And as Cinna hadn’t been successful reaching any family member currently living in New York, she would have to opt for the option of the tiny Columbia College dorm room and her stuck-up flatmate.

The big bag with her bedding shouldered, she dragged her enormous trolley through the filthy corridors, towards the exit, to take the bus back to Manhattan. The handle of her smaller suitcase chafed her palms. They burned, and with the throbbing pain in her head, Cinna suddenly realized that it was not the feeling to return to her petty roommate that she could not stand; but that Christmas, as she had always known it, was cancelled.

With a small sniffle she made it out into the cool air. It was the last spark of hope that made her observe the waiting passengers at the taxi stand and look for the tall figure of her brother, overly freckled and with the same light Nordish hair as herself, while she stood at the corner where the airport shuttle would depart. But as the electric lights illuminated the scene, Cinna was still alone.

Now that she had taken care of everything, she carelessly had let her luggage fall into the snow. She bit her lower lip to prevent the tears from streaming down her cheeks. Such a childish reaction, she scolded herself, when she heard a little whimper escaping her throat, only to be muffled in her handkerchief.

The wind stung as icy needles in every piece of exposed skin. At times, it was so cold and sudden that Cinna briefly forgot to breathe. She pulled her coat tighter, folding her arms and wishing to have packed her gloves not mindlessly deep down in her suitcase. She pattered on the spot because her toes slowly, but steadily, got chilled from standing. Now and then, when she was not busy with turning her back against the wind or to try and fix loose strands of hair behind her red ears, uneven sobs paved their way up her throat.

When the bus finally pulled in, she wanted to exhale in relief. But the increased flood of travelers had clogged up most of the seats already when the bus had stopped at the D- and C-terminal. Even though everybody tried to squish and squeeze themselves and their luggage into the vehicle, Cinna was one of a dozen people who were left to wait for the next one. She felt slightly lost, as she watched two children in the last few rows waving at her behind the fogged windows.

It was then that her eyes fell on one of the pay phones on the other side of the exit. Without hesitation, she pulled herself together and hobbled, laden like a packhorse, under the protective canopy, and ringed Roxy’s apartment.

“You’ve reached Roxanne Liljeqvist, please leave your name and number with a message“ heard Cinna the surprisingly serious answering machine jumping in

“Hey“ she said, weakly. “It’s me, Cinna. – Our flight has been cancelled due to the storm, and I wasn’t able to reach Mickey, so…” She paused for an involuntary break because she was struggling with her tears for the umpteenth time. “I’m going back to the campus, if you could just call me, when you get this“, she choked out and sniffled. She glanced around. What a shitty way to spend December, 24th. “I really do not know what to do, and -“

“Cinna?“ There was a hand on her shoulder, and when she saw aside and blinked with icy lashes, his sight was so surreal that he had to pick up the receiver from her hand and replace it himself. “Good lord, your lips are blue – give me your hands … how long have you been out here?“ he asked a bunch of questions without expecting an answer. He was still the same as she remembered him – still achingly beautiful and handsome at the same time, his whole demeanor so gentle and loving that something in her chest both exploded with joy and pain.

“What – I do not understand“ she stammered, teeth rattling, while he unceremoniously slipped out of his large coat and wrapped it around her. Hastily, she wiped the traces of tears from her cheeks. Despite the hustle and chaos around them, he turned very quiet at once. His hand stroked her back, and suddenly, a last wave of emotion bubbled up in Cinna. In an attempt to divert attention from her shimmering eyes, she sniffed and asked. “No, really, what are you doing here?“

“I wanted to pick up Joey“, he replied. “The non–stop flight from Akron usually comes at five–thirty, but now… no idea when and if.“

“Oh, right.“ Cinna rummaged for her handkerchief. Somewhat more composed, she looked at him. To protect himself from the icy cold, he had hidden his face in a big scarf, which he had wrapped several times around his neck. Over the grey fabric, a piece of the upper lip peered out, and with a sudden chuckle she pressed down the fabric, just to make sure she wasn’t seeing things. “You got yourself a beard?“ She inspected the small pirate beard, and couldn’t resist running her thumb over the short-trimmed hair on his chin. It was as dark as his blonde hair on his head, only that the latter had been dyed to disguise the gray strands.

His relieved smile, still from when she had started to brighten up, faded somewhat. “Why, don’t you like it?“ he asked. Cinna couldn’t tell whether his puppyish insecurity was show or partly real, but she was convinced that it was the most endearing way to react.

“No, it’s cute. – You have quite a lot of gray hair there“ she grinned with a shiver.

His lips curled. “Well, thank you for pointing out that not everybody is 21. – Come with me, you royal icicle, before you get frostbite. It’s not very fashionable. The car is parked right over there.“

At dusk, the lights of the taxi forecourt drilled into their pupils, as they made their way through the crowd of disappointing Christmas 1993 stories. Cinna followed David, only with her backpack. To her surprise, he had seized her pieces of luggage without questioning. They shortcut the way to the parking lot by making their way over the hard wall of dirt snow that had been piled up by the snow plough. She was already ankle–deep in the crunching mass, as he offered his free hand to help her. Fortunately, her cheeks already glowed brightly orange. She mumbled thanks and followed him.

Leaving the dreary picture of the airport behind, they reached the black Bertone he already had driven in Switzerland. David walked around the hood and opened the rear side door, only to place the suitcase on the back seat, and then paused with his hand on the handle of the passenger’s door.

“Cinna“ he muttered her name for the second time. There was no hurry in it. He slid his arm around her waist and pulled her closer to him. “I need to ask you something.“

His body against hers was so different from Heathers’ or Melissa’s, but not uncomfortable. For a body without boobs, she had to admit, he wasn’t shabby at all. Their blue eyes met, and for the moment, before she saw it, Cinna actually thought of the possibility of kissing him on his gray stubble and his slightly opened lips.

She couldn’t help but fall from the high cloud she had been sitting on when she saw the mischief gleaming up in his gaze, the little grin dancing around in the corner of his mouth. Her held breath loosened in an anticlimax.

“Yes?“ Trying to hide her disappointment, she decided to tag along with his little game. As she put her arm around his shoulders, she felt his warmth. She saw his eyes briefly lingering on the tiny, glittering drops of melted snowflakes in her hair.

“Would you do me a favor…“ David exhaled. “… and drive?“

If she wouldn’t have seen it coming – oh, how angry she would have been about this turn of events. But now, she laughed with him, both still with their arms around the other, before they let go, chuckling.

As she rounded the hood of the Volvo, having a few moments to her own without him being able to see her face, Cinna thought of how he had taken his time for the joke. She remembered the seconds from when the rogue had initially come into his eyes until he had spoken; and how he had only released her when she had done the same.

It eventually didn’t matter how cheesy his joke had been. Suddenly, the memory of him first kissing her and then telling her that he shouldn’t and most definitely wouldn’t again from that point on was nothing more than that: a memory, just as the months of undetermined silence that had followed. But his hand, so delicately placed in the hollow of her spine, had promised her something different.

The drive went by in mostly silence filled with music. As on their rides from Lausanne to Montreux back in Switzerland, it was David’s job to interrupt the CD playback to catch the news for possible updates on the situation at the airports, but nothing changed.

Cinna leaned back in her seat. All roads were hopelessly stuffed. It was rush hour and Christmas. No other route would help her escape the waiting time in a traffic jam. She might as well not get upset about it instead of moping around as Mickey always did.

Eventually, they exchanged a few bits and pieces – he wanted to know how her thesis preceded (excellent, but of course there was always room for improvement), what her family had planned for the holidays (eating and gossiping about the relatives, quite probably), whether her ex-girlfriend Heather had actually been accepted and started Columbia in autumn as she had planned (she did not, and Cinna was kind of glad).

Cinna did not ask him about his work – whether he still exclusively painted or had returned to music. It was a touchy subject. While she would have taken off all her clothes if he did just as much as saying please if he wanted to go back to painting her, she didn’t need him to tell her a second time that this would be highly inappropriate in his opinion. Given that there was snow around, she wondered whether it was actually killing him to not be able to use the possibility of capturing her. It had been her colors that had convinced him to talk to her in the first place, back in January: the long hair was almost glowing in the fading blue light; her faded summer tan that revealed the dotted cluster from head to toe on her skin; the warm, deep rusty red of her lips in the cold.

“Don’t you have to take this exit?” David said.

She glanced at him. “I need to get to Amsterdam Ave. In this traffic, it won’t be a problem for you to hop into the driver’s seat.”

His reaction was a bit delayed, as if he would just realize something. He nodded. “Oh, sure.“

Instead of taking the route south downtown, they drove from the east side of Manhattan right to the opposing side of the island, where Columbia campus was located.

With the new perspective of staying in NYC, Cinna suddenly realized that she had the great opportunity to spend time with her favorite sister instead of the rest of their family. She thought of past summer holidays when Roxy had made them pancakes with cranberries and vanilla sauce and they had sat on the floor in her tiny apartment in Queens, watching the Addams Family movies.

It was the mental image of them talking about girls and watching cheap TV that had cheered up Cinna a little after her cancelled flight and almost-kiss when they held in front of Hartley Hall. The prestigious green copper roof of the nine-story building was buried in at least a foot of snow.

“Should I…” David glanced at her from behind the steering wheel, just as she was picking up her last piece of luggage.

The hand on the open passenger door, she leaned forward to look at him. Shaking her head, the former hair bun almost dissolved from the wind, she smiled. “No, thank you. You’ve done enough. Thank you so much.”

It was there, again, just a glimpse and maybe a feeling. She couldn’t quite put her finger to it, whether it was sheer temptation, love or something else, but she wanted to kiss him, she wanted him to see her naked body and have him touch her with his hands in the same way he sometimes looked at her, when she and her colors seemed to him as something that you couldn’t mix, or display, not fully.

“Merry Christmas, David”, she said.

He nodded briefly. “Merry Christmas, Cinna.“

Maybe she got the idea already when she stepped out of the elevator on the ninth floor and found the apartment and common room drained of sounds and company, or maybe it was only after she had put her bulky suitcases back in her room. At one point, the shoes still on her feet, she paused.

A follow–up thought that had gotten lost somewhere over the surprise and the prospect of pancakes, emerged in her head. Originally, he had been at the airport to pick up his son – and given the fact that he had felt no time pressure to drive back to Columbia with her instead of going straight to the Essex Hotel Apartment, he had no other obligations.

She grabbed her jacket, wallet and keys in the pockets, and ran down the stair flights. The elevators were among the oldest on the whole campus.

The weather had worsened. The cold December wind swirled the densely falling flakes around in the air and made it difficult for everybody to see far. She blinked and hurried along the car row until she saw the square brake lights of the Volvo.

David looked up from the radio as she knocked on the glass. He leaned over and popped the door open from the inside. “Have you forgotten something?“ he asked.

“Uh -“ To have makeshift shelter from the weather, Cinna stuck her head through the gap. “No, but – if you wanted to pick up Joey – and were not in too much haste to get me here – then you have no other guests over and no other plans for the holidays” she concluded.

He frowned a tiny bit. “Yes?“

“Do you want me to come?“ Cinna offered, when he didn’t seem to grasp what she was getting at.

“Come where?“

“To your place.“

He laughed, as if she had replied with something along the lines of ‘on the expensive Persian carpet in your living room, of course!’ “What?”

Behind them, a honk squeaked: the car line moved further forward. David signaled Cinna that she should get in. “Don’t you have something better to do?“ He wanted to know from her with an amused face when she closed the door. “What about that journalist sister of yours, the Roxy that hates your mum and likes music from Roxy Music?“

“I do not know whether she is home again,“ said Cinna lightly. “So?“

“Of course you can come“, David said. “I can’t offer you great excitement, though. I’ll probably finish my belated Christmas-, respectively New Year’s greetings to send them out by tomorrow. You’d really be better off by calling your sister.“

The brake lights in front of them went out again. He put the car in gear and let it roll at leisurely pace.

Cinna felt like he cheated himself out of an answer. “Uh“, she glanced back. At this point, she could only make out the corner of John Jay Hall.

David had the same thought. Peeking in the rear mirror, he calmly looked at her.

“I think, you’d better go now.”

“Yeah”, she said dryly, only pressing the high sounds through her suddenly tightened larynx. “Probably.”

The heat, drained from her, suddenly came back at once. It was as if every cell of her body was scalded. And there were the tears again, hot and ruining her sight. She climbed out of the car – stumbled, rather – and threw the heavy door shut behind her.

It could’ve been the last time she saw him, just as they had parted ways back in the flickering summer heat in front of JFK airport without the promise of calling or keeping in touch. But as she lied on the couch in the common room, her whole body softly aching, she realized that it wasn’t hers to decide whether he wanted to give in to her. She could be oh–so–tempting, if he had fixed his mind on shouldn’t and wouldn’t, then that was it. She couldn’t even be mad or sad about it, as she surely would have been with a regular breakup, as it had never really begun. It was just a chance not taken.

“You’re not that hot, anyway”, she said loudly and didn’t know whether she meant herself or him. With the possibility of it happening out of the picture, she didn’t even had to worry about the details between the sheets anymore, about what she would have had to do once he had taken off his fancy suit.

“Who are you talking to? And what are you even doing here?”

With a slight eye roll, Cinna sat up. The skinny French girl with the angel face and the gaping hole where her heart should have been, stared at her. She couldn’t afford to go home, but apparently to get on both their nerves by engaging in this conversation.

“My flight got cancelled. – I thought I was alone.”

“Ditto”, snapped Véronique and grabbed her coffee cup from the couch table. “I’m going out later, and if I come home and find you having your gal pal over and you’re snogging on the couch again –”

“Ah, shut up and get some yourself, Véro” Cinna was done with things she didn’t want to prolong. Surprisingly, the tactic worked this time. Her flatmate retreated back to her room, and soon the sound of 1980s synth pop dribbled over the threshold of the shut door into the whole apartment.

When the house phone rang, Cinna was the only one who even heard it. “Roxy?” she asked, expecting her older sister to be waiting in the lobby. Roxy was very quick checking her answering machine and pager and turning up in the various corners of NYC within a minimum amount of time.

“No, it’s Becky, from the reception?”, said the voice of a student who already regretted her choice of vacation employment. “Somebody was here for Liljeqvist.”

“That’s me.”

“Well, it was your dad. I sent him upstairs.”

“You did w-“ With a quick thought of the French devil in her room, Cinna decided that it was better to skip the lecture about security policies for visitors on campus. She only had time to get out of the lounge to the front door, when a soft knock was heard from outside.

With a stash of sass borrowed from her poignant sister, she opened the door. “You know, pretending to be my father isn’t very sexy.”

David didn’t smile. “May I come in?”

“You may not, actually.” Cinna didn’t move an inch. “There’s somebody else here and I don’t want her to see you. – What even is it?” she asked. Without being able to avoid it, her voice sounded vulnerable.

“I wanted to apologize“ he said roughly. His different eyes fixated her sincerely. Looked at her. “You’ve caught me off guard there. I didn’t meant it to come out that way, but I was just – I didn’t really know what you intended.“

Cinna raised her eyebrows quietly.

David’s glance averted for a bit, looking around in the cleaned and tidied up lounge room behind him. “I didn’t mean to make you feel sorry for me“ he said hesitantly, hands in his pockets, breathing loudly in and out again. “I like you incredibly much, and of course I want to spend the evening with you, but I wasn’t sure whether you pitied me or not.“

Cinna growled softly, already smiling. “And you just couldn’t ask but had to make me go through all of this mental rollercoaster for what, you funny little guy?”

He took the title with a gentle smile, still two inches smaller in shoes than her in socks. His smile was boyish and adorable. “Well, I also may have wanted the chance to really ask you if you want to spend with me the evening with me.“

Cinna grinned. “Just one minute to get my things, and I’m yours.”

_Oh, thank God, it was Christmas._


	2. Chapter 2

The apartment had not changed in the least, when Cinna entered. In the fireplace, a maid had lighted a softly crackling fire. The doors to the studios stood wide open, the fumes of turpentine and paint filled the air.

“Sit down, please,” David invited her, while taking the milk out of the refrigerator, and Cinna obliged. That was when she saw it: the framed picture of him and his lover, lying in a very naked embrace on a beach in Sydney, hung in its place above the sofa.

“Did you plan on going on vacation?,” she asked when he brought their cups. It had been unavoidable for her to notice the suitcases, piled up next to the door in the entrance hall.

In his casual black turtleneck, he stretched with a small yawn. “We spend the holidays on the Grenadines. Joe has a new girlfriend, or at least he likes her, and I guess he wants to impress her a bit. Not complaining, I rarely see the kid.”

Cinna quietly looked at him. When speaking of his villa in the Grenadines, it could only be the estate which had been planned by none other than Arne Hasselqvist. She was at a loss for a reply.

The silence startled her, when David didn’t go on. He looked at her attentively, in the same comfortable position with one knee pulled to his chest as usual. Her eyes flickered back to the photographic print above his head. They had taken the subway to get back here. If he had had time to make the conscious decision to show up in front of her door to ask her out, then he would have had a moment to stay a bit longer and put the image back into its hiding place behind the bookshelf.

“Hey,” he remembered suddenly, breaking the silence. “The other day, Skrebneski wanted to know whether he could photograph me and Mustique around New Year’s Eve, and came by to see a few pictures to get a rough impression. I haven’t put them back yet, and you like Hasselqvist, right?”

Surprised by the unexpected opportunity, Cinna looked at him. “Are you kidding? Of course,” her mouth answered before her mind had a chance of grasping why exactly he was offering this. Back in February, as soon as she had remembered their first encounter and his remark about his villa, she had gone down to the library and had searched previous issues of Architectural Digest for editorials on Hasselqvist’s work, but had not found an entry about his work for Mr. Surprisingly Boring Rockstar.

She followed David’s small stature with her eyes, as he searched around in his studio for a little while, putting documents aside and rummaging in a drawer, before he returned.

She had expected that he would sit down in his armchair, but he dropped beside her on the couch and handed her a stack of photos. As she looked at him, Cinna noticed a dried light blue smear behind his ear, where he must have scratched himself while handling his oil colors. He painted, still. Without her. The thought hurt a bit, but the feeling was quickly and almost completely wiped out by the warmth of his grin when he noticed her glance.

As she went through the pictures, she could feel his shoulder against hers. Like the time when she had met him at the airport, he smelled of the same mixture of velvety vanilla and artist.

“That was our first Christmas on Mustique,” he suddenly said with a look towards the gangly teenager in the photo. He had spiky blonde hair and stood dripping wet on the wooden planks of the deck. In the background flickered an artificial koi pond, the surface roughened from the light breeze. Beside him sat a woman in a short t-shirt. Short strands of black hair stood up from her head in all directions. Her smile revealed a row slightly crooked teeth.

Pointing her finger at the stranger as if she was five, Cinna asked, “Who is this?”

“Coco.” David’s tone was airy. “Without her, I wouldn’t get 90% of my press appointments and never attend the rest. – It was her who had the idea to go to Mustique and meet Arne.”

With a small nod, Cinna continued to flip through the photos. The beauty of the property was overwhelming. It felt like an elongated pavilion in the style of a potpourri of a multitude of Asian cultures, an artificial hybrid architecture. The resemblance to Hasselqvist’s own property, Shogun, was undeniable. Darkly varnished tropical wood, straw coverage and seamless transitions between interior and exterior space with generous wall openings dominated the floor plan. The U-shaped single-story villa nestled up to the courtyard, which offered the pond and a swimming pool on two levels. Beyond, the terrain fell steeply, and only the tops of the tallest palm trees concealed the view towards the sea horizon.

Coco was in several of the pictures. In the images in which she did not smile, her face had something raven-like. She wasn’t ugly, but her face had a piercing expression. Her narrow nose was slightly crooked, and her black button eyes seemed to glare knowingly at Cinna. As the years went by, her hairstyle and fashion changed, but the look remained. It was obvious to Cinna that she had had feelings for David at the time.

With the image of the bathing boy on top again, Cinna gently placed the stack on the coffee-table next to her. The memory of Cocos eyes had burned itself into her memory. With a little hum, she drew her knee to her chest, as David had done, and put her chin on it, lost in thought.

She was aware of how close he was sitting beside her; his arm in the soft gray cashmere grazed hers again. When Coco had fallen for him – which really wasn’t that hard under the influence of a strange, tropical atmosphere – and she worked for him up until this very day – then he would have had to ask her at one point or another, for her to revert back to her position as his personal assistant. Irrespective of their history together. Cinna’s bright eyes wandered back to the image of the China Girl and David over the sofa. Lost lovers.

Suddenly, she turned back to him. “What we have done in Lausanne,” she said. “Does it mean something?”

There was nothing more awful than the moment when she posed this question. He was so close to her; she could observe how every muscle in his face slipped briefly from his control, when she confronted him unexpectedly. The next moment, he cleared his throat. “Cinna -”

The word led nowhere but silence. It wasn’t a short, spontaneous yes, it was the opposite. His attempt to fill the distance between them, failed. “ Why?” he wanted to know. His face reflected his uneasiness. The mismatched eyes twitched back and forth between the small frown above her nose and her tense mouth.

Vaguely, Cinna shrugged. It had only been a feeling that had risen in her when she had thought of his assistant. That was the point: Coco was still personal assistant to Mr. Jones, instead of Mrs. Jones.

David looked at her, without having given her an answer. In his eyes laid something seeking for shelter. It was an effort of will for her to continue to pry. Suddenly, he seemed so small to her, smaller than he had ever been.

“Did you invite me over to convince me to come back to you as a model?” she asked bitterly, without expecting a clear response. He’d never given her answers if the questions did not fit him. And even if it were so, he would never admit it –

“No!” It was so sudden and sure that she moved away from him, as if to see him more clearly. He had crossed his arms defensively in front of his chest and glared at her as if she had offended him by even considering this possibility. “I’d never think that you would fall for something like that.”

What may have been an honest and reasonably flattering answer, made Cinna groan. “Then tell me why you asked me! What am I doing here?” she shouted angrily. The moment she spat out the question, she felt that it had been waiting down in her throat to come out since summer: the wondering of why he had taken her to Lausanne in the first place, when he didn’t trust himself.

“I don’t know, okay? I like you!”

Cinna paused grimly. “Good,” she said, satisfied with the answer.

He scrutinized her face sincerely. The heated outburst was over, he was calmer now. “Something else?”

She thought for a moment. “What happened to your fiancée?” she asked. “Why did you ever separated?”

A bitter smile appeared on his face. He went silent for a moment before he found the right way to put it. “I woke up one morning,” his view trailed across the room to avoid looking at her, “and found that what we had wasn’t love, but my need for her, and that this was over. I no longer needed her – which is a ghastly thought, if you expected that you had found the one person to share the rest of your life with.”

Cinna could almost see it: a cold morning in late summer. The rainfall from last night rose as mist over the damp grass as the sun took its course in the morning sky. A forgotten cigarette between his fingers, behind him his sleeping fiancée, David was nothing but a silhouette at the window, sleepless and full of regret. When she dared looking at him again, his face was in a cynical grimace.

“Of course, I did the wrong thing and proposed to her, because I thought that it would go by if I tried hard enough, and overall it was an experience that I am not very keen on repeating, if you understand,” he muttered curtly.

“Yeah,” Cinna said.

“Old people are fairly inflexible, maybe you’ve noticed that,” he continued. “And in my case - let’s put it this way, there is nothing romantic to a fate as collateral damage just because I’m not getting my life together.”

Impressive reasoning, Mr. Jones, but consider this: you are still in love with me and vice-versa, thought Cinna and looked at him. And besides, you’re sitting right next to me.

Their silence seemed to bug him. “Do you remember how you were sitting right here and wanted to know whether I like being alone?” he remembered. Without waiting for her answer, he carried on. “Of course I have moments where this is rather involuntarily. But my point is that I have nobody because in the past, I have never been there as a husband or father, when I really should have been.”

“I’m sorry,” Cinna said weakly.

“Well, it’s not like this is not my own doing,” he murmured.

“Yes, but anyway.” Blindly, she groped for his hand. For a few seconds nobody moved.

His different eyes stared at her. The tip of his pink tongue appeared fleetingly between his parted lips and moistened them. The seconds seemed to go by very fast at once, and she just stared at him, eyes wide open. He neither had pulled his hand away, nor averted his glance.

“David,” she said softly, and all of a sudden every little hair on his neck stood up as if he had been electrified . His scanty resistance fell, and then he waited, too.

Years later, she would still have to assure him that she had actually heard what he had said to her. It only had been completely irrelevant to her. Since the summer of 1993, Cinna’s mind was fascinated by the opportunity to commit this very specific error.

She raised her hand and ran her slender fingers through his soft hair. When she finally bent down and finally kissed him, he sighed softly.

New York City awoke the next morning largely unscathed. The sky stretched over the city in clear, lightest blue. Radio stations reported no significant increase in fatal traffic accidents from last night, and the travelers who had been stuck at railway stations and airports were with their loved ones on Boxing Day at the latest. It seemed as though NYC had escaped with no more than a fright.

The damage the snowstorm had caused, was still unnoticed.


End file.
